Match fixing?
Betting match?
Cricket betting is a billion dollar industry in India
Some of the foreign players are also bribed secretly
Corruption & modelling has destroyed Indian cricket
Most of the Indian players are bribed heavily & openly
Bets are placed on every ball, every over, every player,
Bookies take bets on phone & now one can bet online also!

English conditions....!!! Nicely covered up! No one...(aka Steve Waugh) would adivse English captains on not asking for England friendly pitches. Wonder why? And when India played on a pitch that looked liked freshly cut lawn last year...no such article appeared in Economist. And I still wonder why?

Thank the English god that at least the magazine quoted an example from England side.

And the same goes for baseball. High outfield walls, deeper out field to left or right, long in-field grass, base paths sloped to have bunts roll foul or stay fair. It is all part of the game - parks are unique and provide a home field advantage in that the home team recruits and trains to take advantage of their particular conditions.

Truly fabulous game though baseball is, it's not at all the same in this respect — because the pitcher doesn't bounce the ball off the pitch the way a bowler does in cricket. Honestly. This is the core element of bowling (i.e. pitching) in cricket — trying to achieve a certain pace, bounce, spin or deviation off the surface, with consistency, over 7 hours of play, for 5 days. And each surface plays WILDLY differently. (And because the game can last 5 days, with players running on the pitch throughout that time and digging it up with their cleats, and the sun beating down on it with no time for watering, the pitch "deteriorates" hugely to the point of being almost unplayable on by the last day — which is why batters almost always score very little runs on the last day. And so a lot of the in-game analysis on Day 1 and Day 2 is about trying to assess "how" the pitch will deterioriate over five days, because it has a massive material effect on the outcome.)

I love all sports — and you're right, each stadium in every sport has its idiosyncrasies – but cricket is truly unique in this respect. It's why each stadium's groundskeeper is famous in his own right and integral to the outcome of the match. And why only in cricket do you find an hour's pre-match analysis on TV dealing with a forensic, microscopic examination of the pitch — close-ups, debates, analysts sticking things in the ground to show the depth of certain cracks, etc.

There is nothing wrong to prepare pitches suiting to the home team but the pitches should be result producing and the bowlers spinners or fast should be able to get wickets in five days long battle. Making dead wickets unable to produce results often we see in Sub Continent is unfair and needs to be discouraged. MS Dhoni will be surely an "immoral" if he asks the groundsmen to produce a dead wicket.

ahhh.. so well written. Your last observations affirm in particular, that the batsman friendly 20/20 format is a charade. Adding galavanting cheerleaders, politicians and bollywood stars into the mix doesn't help much either.

Great piece - would challenge that this is unique to cricket though. Football (soccer) pitches are regularly widened and lengthened within the measurements allowed to suit a teams style.
I also believe rugby's league and union sometimes alter the length of their turf to assist running game or kicking games

Yes, but not nearly to the same extent. Not even close. It happens in cricket to such an extent that the groundsmen at different stadia around the world are well-known characters ... and to the extent that, as we have seen in the last few weeks with India/England, news reports in the build-up to a game will usually discuss endlessly, for weeks on end, what the individual character of the pitch is likely to be.

Agreed, many sports have variable elements that can impact on cetain aspects of the players' performance (rain can make ball-handling trickier in rugby for example, and tennis surfaces famously reward differing playing styles) but this is nearly always less complex and generally at the margins. As some other commenters here have pointed out, no other sport has the level of analysis around the atmospheric and pitch-related conditions that is necessary to understand how a game of cricket will/is being played out - for the simple reason that even if, say, a football club left its grass long and dry, Barcelona's odds of beating them would scarcely alter, despite their preference for shorter, slicker turf.

Football teams do sometimes play a different style depending on the dimensions of the pitch, but it is not common (I think Arsenal used to have a particularly narrow pitch, before they moved to their new ground, for example). In any case, it is not quite analogous to preparing a wicket to suit a certain type of bowling. For one thing (I think I am right in saying) football clubs can't change the dimensions of the pitch from game to game.

The best football analogy I can think of was a lower league club in England a few years back (I can't for the life of me remember which it was), which used to water heavily the corners of their pitch before a game. This was because they used to play a long-ball game which involved hoofing the ball into the channels. The idea was that if the earth was sodden it would hold up and not simply bounce out for a goal kick. Not sure it was particularly effective. But I'm certain it was absolutely miserable to watch.